101 New Beetles Found

Tropical rainforests are known for their high biodiversity of countless species, many of them unknown and not named by scientists yet. A large proportion of this undiscovered life on earth is formed by insects, especially beetles.

In a single paper, a team of researchers described 101 new species of weevils (A weevil is a type of beetle) from New Guinea, more than doubling the known species in the beetle genus, Trigonopterus. Since describing new species is hugely laborious and time-intensive, the researchers turned to a new method of species description known as “turbo-taxonomy,” which employs a mix of DNA-sequencing and taxonomic expertise to describe species more rapidly.